In spite of my lackluster blog posts, this week has good. The gym grind is fun and I went all 5 days - never made it that far before! I normally go monday and tuesday, then fuck off by wednesday or thursday at the latest. I also got the chance to go to a yoga class yesterday, which is unprecedented for me. It turned out to be a lot more of a workout than I was expecting, but I appreciate how it makes you pay close attention to your posture and breath. I've been trying to do that more, anyways. The instructor reccomended a book called Eastern Body, Western Mind, that I'll definitely be checking out soon.
Another big thing this week was that I got a chance to check out some DSA events again - I've been a member for quite some time, but haven't done much to participate. Both were well-attended, of course there's a lot of buzz around it right now because of Zohran. I'll try to do some canvassing soon for some of the campaigns they got going, that'll be one more first for me. Doesn't seem like something I'd be especially good at, but I figure one of the points of moving here was to work on my people skills.
Finally finished Kitchen Confidential earlier today, which actually really rocked. Bourdain was something else. It was special to read it here in New York. There's a lot of that spirit in it, and when you look up it's right there. His afterword hit me like a ton of bricks, emotionally. When I told people I was reading his book, the conversation tended to drift morbidly to his death. A lot of people view his fate with a kind of poetic irony since he had, in many ways, a profoundly enviable life. I wonder if this sentiment is less common among folks who have read this book, and knew his work more closely. I suspect that once you have that sickness, it stays within you. It's kind of like the "once an alcholoic, always an alchoholic thing". You can only fight it off for as long as you can. He managed clean himself up and accomplish a lot before it got to him, and I think that's worth celebrating. It seems wrong to me to let it cast a grim shadow on the work.
The guy loved food. He was obssessed with food.
I've been thinking a bit about obsession. Sometime last year, I was talking with someone who was the guitarist/vocalist for some punk band (I forget the name), and what's stuck with me from our conversation about practicing guitar was their simple statement: "You need to be obsessed with it". Hard to dispute, especially here where the competition is harder than anywhere. Whatever it is your doing, that shit needs to be a religion to you if you want even a chance of being taken seriously and going anywhere with it. The unfortunate thing about obsession, some might say, is that it's more a condition you find yourself immersed in rather than something you can intentionally cultivate. There's no asking "can I force myself to become obsessed with mastering guitar?" - you either are or you aren't.
I'm not obsessed with playing guitar or writing songs. I'm not obsessed with radio. I'm not obsessed with drawing pictures or building sculptures. I'm not even really obsessed with writing or reading. I'm definitely not obsessed with theory or politics. If I was obsessed with any of these things, I'd spend time actually engaging with them and learning to know them better. I've only been doing this daily blogging for a week and it already feels like a chore, like a bigger, more demanding task than I bargained for.And yet...
We're gonna keep it going.
I'm open to the idea that maybe this idea - that obsession is an unconsious phenomenon that can't be cultivated - is actually just the sickness talking and I'm just being incredibly toxic by sharing it. Maybe I just need to take the time, give myself a chance to try things, get the ball rolling, and then from there the obsession will come. I think it's possible that what I'm obsessed with is the sickness itself. That's what draws me in more than anything else, I'm fascinated with it. What it is and what you can do with it. The art that I connect with the most is the stuff that deals with it - I want to find a way to do that.
keep fighting,
-v0id
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